Posts Tagged by characters
| May 22, 2013 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article is by Angela Murray (aka Orikes), an occasional graphic designer, a sometime photographer, and one of the voices over at Rogue Princess Squadron, a new gaming blog put together by several female authors. Though she’s been gaming for years, GMing is still a new love in her life. Thanks, Angela! In an ongoing campaign, the character sheet is in the hands of the player. It’s their baby, their lifeline into the game world. They often put a great deal of time and…
| May 7, 2013 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article is by John Fredericks, and it’s a unique idea we’ve never discussed here before. Thanks, John! Introduction All GMs long for player investment in their characters and in the campaign world. As GMs, we’re often (very) caught up in the planning and running of the game. This makes it difficult for us to gauge whether we are meeting the players’ expectations at the table. In this article, I’ll share an idea that I used recently to garner more player input on their…
| May 30, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
A couple of weeks ago I was at a convention and got to jump into a game of Apocalypse World. Definitely an interesting system with some unique elements and ideas, but one of the things that struck me most about it was a very non-unique element – something I remember doing a long time ago and that somehow slipped out of my library of gaming tools. It was a simple element on all of the character playbooks and in some of the Game Master materials…
| March 21, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
We’ve mentioned that we’re working on our second book a few times over the past several months, but our secretive gnomish nature has kept us from releasing any details — until now! GenCon event listings came out over the weekend, and eagle-eyed Gnome Stew readers may already have spotted this listing: SEM1123263 Meet the Gnomes Behind the Engine! Come and meet some of the gnomes behind the ENnie Award-winning blog Gnome Stew! They’ll talk about what is going on at the blog, as well as…
| June 8, 2010 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
When I’m not sitting behind a screen or writing Gnome Stew articles, I’m also an RPG freelance writer. That means that my weekly group usually gets dragged into whatever I need to playtest for my projects, the latest of which is Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. Running a playtest is like running a one-shot. The players are only going to be playing a short while and it’s often not worth blowing a session on character creation, especially when the players are unfamiliar with the…
| January 18, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
I’m a big proponent of using everything my players give me, especially when it comes to PC backgrounds: If you put it in there, I assume it’s because you want to see it in the game, and I’ll do my best to make that happen. But why assume? As a player, I design character backgrounds this way. I include NPCs my PC would love to fight, fuck, or otherwise interact with; I build conflict into my characters’ pasts, and leave big, juicy pointers to future…
| October 7, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
There are many ways to build a good character, but one aspect that often gets overlooked — or conversely, over-worked — is motivations. If you know what motivates a character — PC or NPC — you can extrapolate a lot of other things on the fly. The trick is not to make your motivators too broad or too focused. Too broad, and they’re meaningless (“She’s motivated by a desire to do the right thing”); too narrow, and they either dominate the campaign or never come…
